Applying For New Jobs after Fired, Amount of Detail When Explaining

Question

I am a 27 year old male in the US. I was with an actuarial consulting firm, my first job out of college, for approximately two years until I was fired. I am starting to apply for new jobs in the actuarial and data science fields. Inevitably, I will likely be asked why I left my old job.

Here is the real reason:

Adjusting to the COVID work-from-home setting was already a little difficult for me. Further, a few months into working from home, my fiancee cheated on me shortly after we set our engagement. Plot twist, she cheated on me with another woman, and made me feel very obligated to continue giving her emotional support and friendship through the transition, (she comes from a... less than supportive family) which was a rather drawn out situation (1-2 months). This would obviously devastate anyone, but since this event occurred I have sought help for mental health and have been diagnosed with situational depression. The 1-2 months I mentioned drastically impacted my performance at work. Nothing terrible like entirely not showing up for work (well, remote work), but I wasn't delivering the quality of work that was expected of me, and I was far less efficient. Not knowing that I had 'situational depression', I thought how I felt was probably how anyone would feel in that situation, so I tried to "tough it out". I despise being dramatic, but I didn't eat or sleep much in those two months and began to have suicidal ideation, ultimately why I sought help. I have continued with therapy, and it has now been brought to my attention that this is not the first event in my life where I have been emotionally impacted by something to a greater degree than an "average" individual may be. Also, being my first job, I never thought to reach out to my manager or HR about what was happening and why my performance was lagging. I thought personal issues were something that should be kept separate from work.

I do have two former managers from this job that have said they would give me a positive reference. I worked for them before any of these issues came to fruition. I began working for my last and final manager 1 - 2 months before the switch to working from home.

My question:

In future job interviews or applications, when asked why I left my former position, how much of the real story should I disclose?

Should I avoid all of it and just say something general like "it was a bad fit?". I certainly don't think all of the details above are necessary, and I don't want to make myself sound crazy, or make them speculate that the issues may return and interfere with my work for their company. What I would hope to communicate if I share part of the real reason, is that I have sought help to manage and prevent 'situational depression', a condition I wasn't aware I had, from preventing me from doing my job. I certainly want to avoid appearing as though I am seeking sympathy, I am not! I am a highly motivated and capable individual and I only hope to give an appropriate and honest answer to why I was terminated, and what I have done to correct the issue.

I understand that answering this question is subjective, since different hiring managers will have different preferences or reactions, but any general advice will be appreciated.

Answer 1

I would keep it short and to the point. You can, for instance, simply gloss over it and say that you were let go during the COVID-crisis without giving further details. For most that will be enough, because many companies cut employment numbers simply as they needed to cut cost (and it's not unlikely this was a factor for your company to start looking for people to let go first).

If you are pressed and/or want to provide a bit more details you can go with a general one-liner saying something like "performance was lower than usual due to some initial impact of having to adjust to home office and a once in a lifetime personal issue that should not repeat itself". You don't need and should not go into any more details, but if you want to be open and honest about it, it should suffice to mention a general personal issue of severe impact that is unlikely to impact you again. And to make the last part clear is important then: You want to give an employer the certainty that whatever did negatively affect you in the past, is not gonna affect you further.

Answer 2

Should I avoid all of it and just say something general like "it was a bad fit?"

Yes, generally you just gloss over anything negative. Save the long winded explanations for therapy.

Answer 3

A good rule of thumb is: Interviewers don't like trying to decide whether the applicant is blameless on a situation.

Let me give you an example.

"Well, I had to leave my last job because my manager and I just couldn't agree on coding standards - we were pretty much living in the Wild West over there, and I got tired of fighting for code quality all the time."

Ok. So, which of these are correct:

• The manager was an idiot, and the ex-employee was trying to implement common sense procedures to maintain production code quality.
• The employee was throwing wrenches into a perfectly working process about an issue that doesn't even apply to their specific situation.
• Both the manager and the employee were wrong and right at the same time, and the truth was in some ugly middle ground.

Any one of them! There's no sure way to tell - and all three of those situations would result in an applicant saying their statement.

If I'm interviewing someone, and they say something bad about a prior job? It doesn't automatically disqualify them or anything. But it raises the question in the back of my mind: what percentage of the problem were they responsible for? And the more issues they bring up, the higher that percentage is likely to be.